WE’RE HEARING a lot of feedback from readers of last week’s column. If you recall, I made some observations that may have been painful about how some mortgage executives exhibit
But first, I will answer a question I often get after I post an article: “How did you come up with that crazy topic to write about?”
Ah, if only we had time to plumb the depths of the writer’s mind, his uncanny inability to filter sensory stimuli, leading to enhanced perceptions of sounds, colors and other features of the environment...oh wait, that’s the definition of schizophrenia. Forget all that.
In this case, the inspiration came from the media swirl going on around me. I was sitting at home watching the ridiculous antics of Anthony Weiner playing out like a Shakespearean tragedy, one penned by the great Bard of Avon after being “inspired” by the movie “Porky’s.”
As I watched the politician self-destruct, in part thanks to his own ridiculous self-taken camera phone pictures, I noticed my daughter taking selfies of her newest fashions and posting them to Instagram. Now, those two examples of selfies come from opposite extremes, but they sort of converged in my odd mind into a common theme. Since I spend hours each day thinking and talking about the mortgage industry, I naturally relate everything to mortgage banking. A new column was born!
OK, so that does actually sound a lot like schizophrenia. On second thought, forget about that question. Who cares where story ideas come from? The point is our industry is chock full of good examples of selfie behavior.
I still think the best example is the lender who drives his team extremely hard based on the company’s own historical numbers without ever comparing them to any external benchmarks. These are the lenders that push back on opportunities like the Stratmor
OK, I can understand not everyone wanting to participate in peer groups (although they are very valuable for all those that do) but I don’t really understand how you manage a business as complicated as a mortgage firm and not embrace data that tells you how you are doing in relation to your peers. At some level, doing your best is hard to know or quantify if you don’t know how others are doing. To me, that’s like taking a selfie because you only care about how you look.
Another great mortgage selfie example is when a lender does a "group grope" strategic planning session which focuses on their internal "what do I want to be when I grow up" thinking, without regard to the changing world around them. What a waste of time! This approach ignores what is happening in the industry and fails to take into account how decisions impact the bottom line. Selfie.
LOS procurement is another one. Have you noticed that LOS vendors tend to be very self-absorbed? They primp up for a demo that shows off their latest half-finished features and gloss over all of the details. I feel like I’m surfing through a dating website. These demos are often out of context with competitors' capabilities and don’t really address the core problems the lender is trying to solve. Selfie!
To slow down the hardworking LOS sales guys who are even now tapping away on their feedback emails, let me be fair and point out that the LOS procurement dance involves two parties.
Lender selfies during this dance focus on their own miserable current state of operations and systems, while touting their 3X sales growth potential and vowing to find a perfect partner who will lead them, painlessly, to their svelte new operational image. These two go off together, bombarding each other with their own selfie images but often destined to a future of disappointment.
Not all LOS projects end in failure, of course, but too many do (in fact, my partner
Maybe that’s why companies on both sides often reach out to objective third parties who can see who they really are. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s what all these teen selfies are showing us, kids trying to see themselves the way their friends do. Unfortunately, our industry doesn’t have arms long enough to get the camera that far away. Thank goodness for peer reviews.
Garth Graham is a partner with Stratmor Group, and has over 25 years of mortgage experience, from Fortune 500 companies to startups, including management of two of the most successful mortgage e-commerce platforms. He was formerly with Chase Manhattan Mortgage and ABN Amro, where he was a senior executive during the sale of its mortgage group to Citigroup.
